Category: Cryptocurrency News

Facebook’s embrace of the metaverse has unleashed a world of new blockchain projects that merge the concepts of virtual reality, digital worlds and cryptocurrencies. The metaverse refers to computer-generated worlds where people can don avatars, explore, interact with other users, play games, create a business, buy and sell land and other assets. Metaverses took the digital realm by storm in 2021, serving as a facilitator of social interaction, business, recreation, gaming and education, to name just a few. They have exploded in popularity and their current momentum suggests they’re going to become a much bigger part of our culture as the new year progresses. So without further ado, here’s a quick rundown of three of the most promising metaverse projects to keep an eye out for in 2022. Bit.Country The metaverse is all about creating value and human connections, and Bit.Country is doing its part by making it more accessible to everyone, regardless of their location, background and beliefs.   Bit.Country is a platform that enables anyone to build their own metaverse, where they can establish their own rules and formats and bring their own cryptocurrency to incentivize and reward followers and contributors. It provides all of the tools needed to get started with a map of their 3D world, support for games, commerce, economics, digital land ownership and governance. Built upon the Metaverse.Network, which is based on Substrate in the Polkadot ecosystem, the metaverses of Bit.Country are hosted within its Continuum. The Continuum can be thought of as a map of all of the “Bit Countries”, with a limited number of coordinates and its future shape driven entirely by community members. Each new Bit Country metaverse that’s created will be placed as a new block somewhere within the Continuum. Metaverse creators can customize the style, shape and texture of their block worlds, and the space within that block can be subdivided into 100 sections that can be independently owned and traded among users. The owners, or landlords, of each section, can then place assets within them, provide services, display NFTs or run events. They can import their favorite cryptocurrency or even create their own, which can be used by community members to buy assets, pay for services or participate in community events and governance. It’s a refreshing alternative to existing metaverses such as SandBox and Decentraland, where many of the rules have already been established. Bit.Country’s ultimate goal is to create a world of perpetual communities, where metaverse worlds can grow exponentially while giving their communities multiple opportunities to participate and earn. It’s a project with a long-term vision that promises to create a new level of social interaction, with unique benefits to its users. PlayMining PlayMining is a metaverse-based play-to-earn gaming platform built by Digital Entertainment Asset that aims to transform online games by rewarding users for playing, instead of charging them money to be able to compete.   While traditional mobile games are often advertised as “free to play” the reality is somewhat different. In order to gain an advantage and progress players are compelled to buy in-game items that have no intrinsic value and soon become outdated, forcing users to buy yet more items. Over time, users may invest hundreds or even thousands of dollars in a game, with no way of recouping that value. PlayMining wants to turn that dynamic on its head, creating a gaming economy that leverages blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs to reward players instead of encouraging them to spend. With PlayMining games, players earn assets in the shape of NFTS from their gaming activities. Blockchain-based NFTs enable real ownership of assets, meaning they can be bought and sold for crypto that can be traded for real-world money, ensuring gamers and creators are compensated for their efforts. PlayMining launched its platform in May 2020 and now hosts three hugely popular play-to-earn NFT games, including its flagship trading card battle game JobTribes, which currently ranks ninth on DappRadar’s game ranking and boasts more than 40,000 monthly active users. Other titles on PlayMining include the puzzle game PlayMining Puzzle×JobTribes and the coin-pusher game Lucky Farmer. Altogether, PlayMining claims more than two million players from over 100 countries have participated in its play-to-earn token economy and that number is set to grow in 2022 with the launch of yet more titles. The multi-task cooking game Cookin’ Burger is set to launch this spring, and will be followed by the debut of the coloring and racing game Graffiti Racer in summer. DEA’s PlayMining is an innovative project that has already shown that profitable gaming is no pipe dream. As we enter 2022, it has every chance of upending the video game industry as we know it. Syn City A massive play-to-earn game that’s well worth watching is the mafia syndicate game Syn City, which is focused on providing greater access to new users. 🚨 MAJOR EVENT UPDATE 🚨 SYN CITY auction coming soon on @CopperLaunch 👀 🏆 Copper Token Launch Auction 🏆 🗓️8th – 10th January (live for 3 days) 🔥 👇Please read the ‘How To’ Copper guide👇https://t.co/9ZAOrqtpbt#Synners will SYN 👉https://t.co/w53OQ9OQ1D 👈 pic.twitter.com/CUUqXVgwl2 — SYN CITY (@SynCityHQ) January 6, 2022   Syn City leverages the concept of tokenized game assets in the form of NFTs, which can be owned both inside the game and also in the wider metaverse. It’s similar to many traditional mafia war games, with players tasked with building up their characters and crews, gathering and managing resources, strategizing, planning raids and attacks on other gamers. Also intriguing is Syn City’s unique Mafia-as-a-DAO governance system, which lets gamers manage their own syndicates. It’s a new take on the idea of a decentralized autonomous organization, in which the community votes on proposals within their syndicates and on the game’s overall direction. It’s a system that ensures Syn City’s metaverse is transparent and provably fair. Syn City’s unique model has won it a lot of fans, with an impressive funding round of more than $8 million in 2021, followed by $3.5 million raised within just 30 minutes of the launch of its IGO on the Binance NFT platform in December, where it now ranks number one for collections.. With more than 200,000 enthusiastic mafiosos signed up so far, the Syn City metaverse looks set to take the blockchain gaming ecosystem by storm in 2022.

It’s the latest addition to a series of crypto-crowdfunding campaigns to receive increased spectator scrutiny.

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PlaceWar is a decentralized strategic play-to-earn game universe deployed on a multi-chain with highly engaging artillery gameplay that allows players to create and define the outlook of the in-game world through building, battles, and alliances. Myrtle Anne Ramos is the Co-Founder and CEO of PlaceWar. She recently joined the Bitcoin.com News Podcast to talk about […]

Built with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use, Polygon (previously Matic) is designed to let organizations and businesses create and deploy their own decentralized applications (dApps). The platform serves as a layer-2 scaling solution that addresses the scalability and rising gas costs of Ethereum and other EMV-compatible networks. Additionally, it also works as a fully-functional chain on its own, thereby cementing itself as a preferred choice for a diverse range of blockchain-based projects. The Polygon development team is also tapping into the NFT and blockchain gaming ecosystems to expand its offering footprint even further. As part of its efforts to bridge Web2 and Web3, Polygon recently launched Polygon Studios, a new initiative that will focus on NFT and blockchain gaming. As of date, Polygon has bloomed into a vibrant ecosystem with more than 100,000 active gamers on its network. More than 3,000 dApps are already harnessing the power of the Polygon network as the platform inches closer towards becoming the go-to layer-2 destination for blockchain gaming, DeFi, and NFTs atop Ethereum. Polygon’s multichain infrastructure offers many features, including one-click deployment, extended modules for developing custom networks, and interoperability with Ethereum and other individual chains. In 2021, Polygon announced its intention to leverage the growth of NFTs by investing in Colexion, Asia’s biggest NFTs marketplace. The platform also highlighted that it would finance 50% of all development costs for projects on GameOn, one of the leading Asian game tech startups, to help bring NFT games on its network. In the meantime, the Polygon team has also launched grants to support promising projects building on its network. Recently, blockchain game Gaia EverWorld, built on the Polygon technology stack, received an undisclosed amount from the Polygon Foundation via a grant. Harnessing Polygon’s unmatched speed and low gas fees, Gaia EverWorld unlocks unlimited opportunities for users in the metaverse. The Gaia EverWorld project is backed by some of the biggest names within the crypto ecosystem, including Binance, BSCStation, AU21, Panda Capital, and others. The platform completed a successful $3.7 million funding round set to be allocated towards expanding into Binance Smart Chain via its NFT collection launch on the Binance NFT platform. As the blockchain gaming and NFT markets continue their upward trajectory, users often face issues like slow throughputs and sky-high gas costs. Polygon combines the best of Ethereum and sovereign blockchains into an attractive feature set, making it one of the most preferred platforms for up-and-coming projects. While there are hundreds of projects harnessing the power of Polygon, two NFT gaming use cases stand out for their potential to play crucial roles in the nascent blockchain gaming industry’s evolution amid the transition to Web3 and the metaverse. Facilitating A Diverse Range Of Use Cases XAYA, the blockchain game development studio behind the first-ever blockchain game Huntercoin (2014), is bringing over its experience and innovative game development product suite to Polygon. Per a recent announcement, Autonomous Worlds, the company behind XAYA, has entered into a long-term strategic partnership with Polygon to bring its decentralized gaming infrastructure onto the layer-2 scaling network. As part of this partnership, Autonomous Worlds will integrate XAYA into Polygon, enabling the development of new blockchain and NFT games on the EVM-compatible sidechain. By leveraging XAYA’s Game Channels technology and Polygon’s inherent features, the next wave of blockchain games can finally deliver unprecedented levels of scalability and interoperability alongside instant settlement and unlimited transaction capability. Jelurida, the company behind Ardor, Ignis, and Nxt chains, has also announced an integration with Polygon. Even though the Ardor and Ignis chains offer the first-of-its-kind parent-child chain architecture merged with native support for NFTs, high speed, and low costs, projects built atop these chains aren’t currently directly compatible with Ethereum or other EVM-compatible chains. Through this integration, Ardor-based NFT game Mythical Beings will be able to expand its reach by tapping into Ethereum and other chains while ensuring that users (and projects) benefit from Polygon’s built-in features. Mythical Beings will use the Polygon bridge to bring its NFT collection on OpenSea, the largest secondary NFT marketplace on Ethereum. The Mythical Beings development team will replicate all NFTs minted on the Ignis chain on the Polygon network via ERC-1155 tokens. Jelurida has already developed an open-source smart contract that will connect users’ Ignis and Polygon accounts via a bridge, enabling users to send all Ignis-based NFTs to Polygon. Once transferred, users can easily list them on OpenSea and other Ethereum-based marketplaces and trade using MATIC, ETH, and USDC tokens on the Ignis chain. Besides facilitating a range of unique projects, the Polygon team is also expanding its footprint in the evolving blockchain ecosystem. In November 2021, the Polygon team introduced the network’s own community-driven and trustless IDO (Initial DEX Offering) launchpad called Polygen. To overcome the problems of existing launchpads whereby whales get the most priority and the core goals of the participating projects are often overshadowed, the Polygen decentralized launchpad is designed to offer participating projects complete freedom. Projects can directly set the amount they want to raise, choose their preferred auction format, and manage their offerings. The Polygen launchpad also enables projects to implement multiple individual rounds and interconnected rounds for seed, private, and public funding campaigns. While most traditional launchpads follow the “gatekeeper” system whereby only a few select projects are launched each month, primarily focused on short-term gains, the Polygen launchpad intends to facilitate the long-term success of promising projects. With so much happening in the cryptoverse, Polygon, Ethereum’s “internet of blockchains,” is rapidly forging a presence across all domains. Now home to more than 3,000 dApps, the platform ranks among the fastest-growing ecosystems in the blockchain ecosystem. Accordingly, all eyes are on Polygon, as it positions itself to support the next wave of blockchain and NFT gaming.

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As the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry continues to grow and expand, many newbies and experienced users still don’t understand the core drivers of the sector’s growth. It is also why mainstream finance still has a hold on the world. Project utility is rising and will create a foundation for growth in 2022 and beyond. DeFi projects exist in virtually every sector of the finance world, and more. Use-cases have taken over as the world has fallen in love with web3 technologies and their various advantages. Here are a few projects that will rock 2022 and beyond. Alkemi Network Sets Standard For Institutional DeFi Alkemi Network, a compliant DeFi liquidity platform fit for institutions, has changed how liquid ecosystems work within the DeFi space. Liquidity pools have been one mainstay of the DeFi space. So much so that projects have dotted the landscape with a good deal of liquidity-based concepts. Alkemi Network offers dual options. It has permissioned and permissionless liquidity pools that are governed by a single token. That is a first for the DeFi space. KYC-liquidity pools allow institutions and professional traders to access the unique investment opportunities available in the nascent DeFi space while still remaining compliant to financial regulations, aka the best of both worlds. Compliant Institutional DeFi nullifies the notion presented by the centralized finance industry that DeFi liquidity projects can’t have trusted spaces. Alkemi’s Earn dApp allows both retail and institutional investors to lend & borrow USDC, WBTC, ETH, & DAI – all with the peace of mind that comes with permissioned pools and institutional-grade reporting features. ClubRare Ties NFTs to The Real World ClubRare has shaken things up in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) space by introducing physical items available for auction. Before now, NFTs only worked within the virtual space. By being the first physical goods marketplace backed by NFTs, ClubRare has found a new niche that changes the utility focus of NFT platforms. On the ClubRare platform, handbags, watches, jewelry, art, food, and sneakers are all available for sale. Real-world value gets expressed via NFTs in the ClubRare space. Creating virtual-only platforms is simple. Any developer can get things going and create a virtual NFT marketplace project. A physical goods NFT marketplace is a different animal. But, it is a niche that will make people beat paths to doorsteps. Manta Network Takes DeFi Privacy to New Levels Before now, DeFi privacy solutions needed hardware layers to work. The Manta Network took things to a whole new level and deploys zk-SNARK cryptographic technology to solve problems. Built off substrate, Manta ensures privacy for Polkadot Parachain auctions and gives users the sovereignty they want. Privacy within the DeFi industry comes with many benefits. One of these is the prevention of hacking. Even if vulnerabilities exist within a project’s code, the hacker can’t do much damage until the code gets patched. User anonymity ensures that hackers and malicious individuals don’t have access to wallet addresses and transaction hashes, thus creating another layer of security within the web3 space. It also creates a new paradigm for web3 users who don’t want pseudonymous transactions, which has its limitations, as proven by elliptical analysis and other methods. Complete privacy is vital, and the industry shall see more of Manta within the DeFi space. Exotic Markets Enables Decentralized Wealth Management Exotic Markets, a Solana-based DeFi wealth management solution, has given the web3 space a new paradigm for portfolio management tools. Exotic Markets has introduced an exotic assistant to help users develop the best DeFi investment strategies for their portfolios. Using three basic operational principles for products, Exotic Markets came up with patterns that generate profits regardless of how the DeFi markets behave. Using risk tolerance, market view, and investment maturity, Exotic Markets guides users for profit optimization. The team at Exotic Markets has taken this further by opening up its architecture to allow developers to deploy their projects with all kinds of advantages. The platform allows developers to create path-dependent products, single product offerings, and vehicles. With innovations such as yield-generating stablecoins, Exotic Markets will continue to be at the forefront of making wealth creation tools available to everyone. What Does 2022 and Beyond Hold For The DeFi Space? As the DeFi space continues to grow and mature, humanity will see the rise of DeFi in different sectors of life. 2022 holds the potential to be the year that the DeFi industry will explode and lead the charge in the adoption of web3 technologies. The world is shifting from web2.0 to web3.0. Even big tech wants a piece of the action, and these companies are trying to get a piece of the DeFi pie. The problem is that decentralization rules the web3 space, and centralized organizations can’t unbundle themselves into this state. It puts the web3 industry at a strategic advantage and reduces the red tape that has stifled the innovation of centralized technologies. 2022 and beyond shall prove to be the highest growth phase of the industry yet. New users shall onboard into the space, and that age of massive adoption of web3 technologies shall then happen. DeFi projects shall lead this new age.   Photo by Makarios Tang on Unsplash

The TON blockchain created by Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov is promising big things will happen this year, setting itself a goal that no other blockchain has yet been able to achieve – it’s aiming for nothing less than mass adoption. TON was created by Durov and his brother Nikolai back in 2017. It’s one of the most ambitious blockchain projects of all and all the more so when we consider its tumultuous past. Designed to be vastly superior to Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of speed and scalability, TON got off to a good start, raising almost $1.7 billion from investors through an initial coin offering. However, things quickly unraveled for Telegram when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in to halt the sale in October 2019, claiming that TON’s GRAM tokens were unregistered securities. That move ultimately led Telegram to drop the TON project, handing over the work it had done to the open-source community, which has since rebranded GRAM as Toncoin. With Telegram washing its hands off of the TON project, very little was heard about it during the intervening months. It had, in effect, become one of a growing number of forgotten blockchains that promised so much only to fade away into obscurity. That all changed last month though, when Durov suddenly announced on Telegram the TON project is not only still “alive” but moreover, “evolving” fast. TON quickly followed up, announcing a partnership with Donate, enabling users to send donations and pay for subscriptions in Toncoin. Then came this week’s promise from TON: “After four years of blood, sweat, tears, and active development from some of the most brilliant engineering talent on the globe, we’re finally at the cusp of something great,” the TON community announced. “Something that has eluded all others, even as they reach untold heights, successes, and trillion-dollar valuations. Mass adoption.” It’s a bold promise but it’s one TON has the means to live up to, as 2022 looks to be a breakout year for the project that aims to unite all other blockchains into a single, decentralized network with blazing fast transaction speeds and low costs. TON is building nothing less than the foundation of web3, with components including decentralized storage, an anonymous network, DNS, instant payments and support for various decentralized services. Much of that groundwork has already been done, with TON launching The Open Network, a stable and extremely scalable multi-blockchain that can handle millions of transactions per second early last year. TON has also completed work on its all-important TON-ETH bridge, making it possible for Toncoins to be transferred back and forth between it and the Ethereum blockchain with ease. As evidenced by the partnership with Donate, TON payments were also finally enabled in Q4 of last year, completing another key milestone. The roadmap for 2022 doesn’t let up, and by the time the year is out TON will have everything it needs to support web3.  Q1 will be especially frantic, with TON set to launch its DNS service that assigns human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services and network nodes on its blockchain, making it as easy to browse as the world wide web. Other milestones include the launch of the TON Proxy, TON DeFi and the TON Developers Program. With those developments out the way, TON’s final tasks will be to complete its distributed file-storage system Ton Storage, and launch its much-vaunted TON Workchains that promise to bridge all existing blockchains into one giant, unified decentralized network. Getting everything in place is one thing – achieving its goal of mass adoption will be quite another. But TON has all the necessary ingredients in place to make it happen, with true decentralization, fast but low-cost transactions and an intuitive user interface the perfect recipe for anyone to buy, sell and transfer assets quickly and conveniently. Through in the DeFi apps on top and financial freedom becomes a reality at last. Now, it’s no longer a question of whether or not TON can live up to its promise. The question now is whether or not the world is truly ready for a fair and unprejudiced financial system that’s free from censorship and accessible to all? Time will tell, but if the answer is affirmative, 2022 is going to be one hell of a year for TON.

Reading all the posts about Crypto.com hack, I quickly login to my CDC app to check. Sure enough, my funds was down a few thousand dollars as compared to this morning when I last checked them! I can feel my heart beat rising, knees getting weak, arms are sweaty. I took a deep breath and…
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Crypto.com has fallen victim to a hack. The crypto exchange announced this in the early hours of Monday after users complained of suspicious activity on their accounts. It is the first centralized exchange to succumb to a hack for the year 2022 coming out of the year 2021 which was riddled with numerous hacks that saw exchanges and users alike lose billions. Crypto.com (CRO) Gets Hacked Users of the Crypto.com exchange began experiencing issues with their accounts. Subsequently, these users realized that their accounts had been hacked and they were missing cryptocurrencies from their balances. In some cases, the hacker had made off with all of the funds in the accounts. Related Reading | Highlighting Risk: These Crypto Coins Carry The Most Leverage Crypto.com took to Twitter to address these issues. In response to reports of the hack, the crypto exchange had promptly announced that it was restricting withdrawals for all users on the platform while assuring the community that all of their funds were safe. We have a small number of users reporting suspicious activity on their accounts. We will be pausing withdrawals shortly, as our team is investigating. All funds are safe. — Crypto.com (@cryptocom) January 17, 2022 The tweet noted that only a small number of users had been affected by the hack. However, users of the platform rolled out en masse to say that this was not so. The number of complaints regarding funds being lost by users in the hack had grown continuously on social media. Most had had a significant amount of crypto stolen and called for the exchange to do something about the attack. Applying Caution Going Forward Following news of the hack, Crypto.com had promptly restricted all withdrawals on its platform. Users were unable to carry out any withdrawals and those with pending withdrawals could not complete their transactions. This was done in an effort to prevent the hacker(s) from being able to perform any more withdrawals from the accounts of the affected users. Related Reading | Crypto Market Is Still In The Early Stages, Says Ric Edelman The attack is speculated to have occurred after the attackers found a way to bypass the 2FA security measures on the exchange. This has prompted Crypto.com to alert users to reset their 2FA information, as well as having to log back into the platform to regain access to their accounts. 1/2Earlier today a small number of users experienced unauthorized activity in their accounts. All funds are safe. In an abundance of caution, security on all accounts is being enhanced, requiring users to: -Sign back into their App & Exchange accounts-Reset their 2FA — Crypto.com (@cryptocom) January 17, 2022 The crypto exchange announced that this update will be rolled out gradually to users. Upon completion, withdrawals will then be enabled and users will be able to send their funds out of the exchange. “We understand this may be an inconvenience, but security comes first,” the exchange said. CRO price falls following hack | Source: CROUSD on TradingView.com Chart from TradingView.com